“Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this b*tch fell out?”
If you were an avid user of Twitter back in 2015, chances are you might be familiar with the famous 148-tweet thread by stripper Aziah Wells, better known to her followers and fans as Zola.
Zola went viral after taking to the platform to recount #TheStory (as it came to be known by fans of the tale) of her fateful meeting with fellow dancer Jessica, who quickly invited Zola to take a work trip to Florida with her.
Knowing there was plenty of money to be made in nightclubs in The Sunshine State, Zola agreed – setting off a chain of events that nobody could have seen coming.
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Zola’s tweets quickly had everyone talking, with thousands wanting to know more about the key players within this insane story of sex, crime and social media. Interest in the tale picked up even more when Zola finally agreed to a tell-all interview with Rolling Stone in November of the same year – and that’s when she caught the attention of production house A24.
The studio behind award-winners Moonlight, Lady Bird and Hereditary, A24 have always had an eye for stories that will capture the imagination of the masses – and the viral thread certainly made for some enthralling source material.
Seeing the potential in Zola’s wild saga, writer and director Janicza Bravo was brought on board to turn the viral tweets into a compelling screenplay recounting every dramatic detail.
Set to hit theaters this summer, Zola is already tipped for success, having been nominated for Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize and with Janicza Bravo selected as Palm Springs International Film Festival’s Director To Watch for 2021. We may even see Zola nominated for an Oscar in 2022…
So, ahead of the release of the first ever movie adapted from a series of tweets, why not familiarise yourself with the source material? In the words of Zola herself, ‘it’s kinda long, but it’s full of suspense’.
The thread has since been deleted from Zola’s Twitter, but has been immortalised – as all great tales are – with a 25-image set on Imgur
Oh, and needless to say – spoilers and lots of adult content ahead.
Zola hits US theaters this summer.
Updated July 2026
The film arrived on 30 June 2021, and the speculation above can now be graded: the Oscar never came. But something better did. Zola aged into canon — IndieWire ranked it 59th among the best films of the 2020s in a June 2025 reckoning — and the thread that started it all has outlived the platform it was posted on, which is no longer even called Twitter. Those 148 tweets now survive most reliably in the gallery above, perhaps one of the internet’s better acts of preservation.
The woman who wrote them — A’Ziah King, to give the byline its correct name — took an executive-producer credit on the film and a clothbound book from A24’s publishing arm, foreword by Roxane Gay. Her relationship with the studio was less serene: in January 2022 she pointed out, publicly and not unreasonably, that a film up for seven Independent Spirit Awards had somehow not included its original author in the writers’ category. We covered that dispute at the time. The awards went well regardless — Taylour Paige took Best Female Lead.
Five years on, everyone the thread touched is still converting it. Paige signed with WME in June 2025, surfaced in HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry, has a Boots Riley film arriving in 2026, and collected a Grammy nomination en route for “We Cry Together.” Director Janicza Bravo made an episode of The Bear in 2025 and was announced, in April 2026, as director of Good Thing — a Martha Stewart biopic, which for a filmmaker who broke through on a stripper saga is a rather perfect promotion within the same subject: American women, money, and the management of a public story. For the genre of ordinary people the internet refuses to release, see our study of the unlikely internet icon.
As for what was true: King told Rolling Stone herself which parts were dramatised — the shooting and the balcony fall belong to the telling, not the record. The record is grim enough on its own. The man the thread called Z was prosecuted in Nevada under his real name, Akporode Uwedjojevwe, and sentenced in February 2017 to sixteen years for sex trafficking and coercion. The thread was entertainment; the case was not. In the words of the author: it’s kinda long, but it’s full of suspense — and, five years later, unusually full of consequences.
